Ok, nice little social media experiment, how does the fediverse fare during an earthquake?
A midnight earthquake just hit my home city, which basically never gets earthquakes. Probably no damage at all from this one, but we all definitely felt it, which is unusual for us! (Prob ~4 on Richter scale)
Where did I go first to check if others felt it? NGL, the place I went last time there was a tremor … Twitter. And to be fair, on the top of my feed were posts from people I follow (who aren’t here) that live in my home city, tweeting about it, including links to official reports. This was very nice, as this time I was scared and thought my apartment building might be in trouble.
I quickly check #mastodon and #calckey. Nothing in timelines. Not surprising, I don’t really follow anyone or many that live in the same city as me.
Searching, mastodon’s hashtag search does ok, and surfaces a bot or two that also confirm the quake (@lastquake@masto.ai). But not many people, I’m not really finding a conversation. Also searching for something by a hashtag you don’t know exists takes a few steps. This is on an instance with ~50k users.
#Calckey’s full text search though (on calckey.social)?
Quicker. Just typed earthquake without worrying about hashtags.
And better results. More people were brought up, which is kinda what you’re after from social media during an event … reassurance. It was also surprising, as calckey has only ~2k users and therefore smaller visibility of the fediverse, but still gave me more connectivity just through search than my bigger mastodon instance.
Which is really an interesting demonstration of how hashtags can be problematic. Plenty of people were reaching out, asking “anyone feel that earthquake?”, they just forgot or didn’t think to use a hashtag, and so couldn’t find me through mastodon. And why would you in a (slightly) nervous situation like that. “Hmmm, is this the best hashtag, do you think people will search for it … I should probably check if it exists first?” … is not a thought goes through your mind.
I basically never visit Twitter since I left, but this was a nostalgic little episode. It was nice to see the fediverse wasn’t really behind big social. Though the lack of discovery facilities on mastodon really did show themselves here.
@maegul @finestructure @lastquake I think the lack of a real search on Mastodon is a death knell. And every time I've seen it brought up by others, it's just shrugged off or dismissed - as if living pre-search should just be considered normal and adapted to. Dismissing daily concerns of users is not how Mastodon is going to grow.
Imagine if Mastodon didn't display videos but, instead, just a link to one. And when it's brought up that this is impractical for almost every normal user, the response would be akin to: "A link is good enough for anyone. It worked back in the 90s and it works now."
Things like that are making me rethink my position about being here and investing any time in it whatsoever.
